“Callousness toward safety and human rights that, unfortunately, the civilized world has come to expect.”
Jerusalem, December 11 – Human groups denounced the congregants at a Jewish house of worship today for an incident over the weekend that the organizations describe as a brutal use of force against a defenseless victim far in excess of what was necessary to accomplish the intended outcome.
Amnesty International, Btselem, and Human Rights Watch issued blistering condemnations today of the peers and some family members who attended the Bar Mitzva proceedings at the Kol Rina synagogue in the Nachlaot neighborhood, where, the human rights groups alleged in separate statements, congregants subjected thirteen-year-old Boaz Ajami, the honoree, to a two-minute barrage of more than a hundred sweets, some of them hurled in excess of forty kilometers per hour.
As a result of the operation, the groups claim, Ajami was forced to shield his head with his prayer shawl and hunker over the reading table where the covered Torah scroll still lay. Witnesses cited in the groups’ statements described the sugary projectiles hurtling through the synagogue air and making a jarring crack each time one of them struck a chair or the plexiglass panel covering the reading table surface.
“We call on the international community to bring the perpetrators of this horrific excess to justice,” demanded Human Rights Watch in its statement about the incident. “The world cannot continue to tolerate disproportionate use of force by Israelis.” The other organizations issued similar pronouncements.
“Celebrating Mr. Ajami’s coming of age could have been accomplished through means far less brutal,” read Amnesty’s statement. “The decision – and it could only have been a conscious decision, given the frequency of events of this celebratory nature that do not resort to such violence – demonstrates a callousness toward safety and human rights that, unfortunately, the civilized world has come to expect from certain familiar quarters.”
Witness reports indicated no physical injuries from the incident, but complaints nevertheless resulted from it. At least two children complained that other, larger children, and possibly even adults, had used greater size, weight, coordination, and experience to intercept or reach the scattered candies before the younger ones could, such that those two children wound up with only three or four candies each. One parent decried the use of candies in the first place, citing health and dental concerns. Another attendee raised alarm about the way in which the ritual added unnecessary minutes to the already-too-long service at the synagogue, forcing him later to shave precious time off of his planned Sabbath afternoon nap.
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